TEDxCHUV - Henry Markram - Understanding the Human Brain: a test of global collaboration

Knowledge of the brain is highly fragmented and we have no way to prioritize the many experiments needed to fill the gaps in our understanding. It is time for a strategy of global collaboration, where scientists of all disciplines work together to solve this problem. We propose building a platform to catalyze efforts, integrate knowledge, and use supercomputers to simulate what is known about the brain, to predict gaps in our knowledge of the brain, and to test hypotheses about how it works.

Henry Markram is the Coordinator of the Human Brain Project, a proposed international effort to understand the human brain. His research career started in medicine and neuroscience in South Africa, then at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, at NIH and UCSF in the United States, and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany. In 2002, he joined the EPFL, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute. His career has spanned a wide spectrum of neuroscience research, from whole animal studies to gene expression in single cells. He is best known for his work on synaptic plasticity. In the past 15 years he has focused on the structure and function of neural microcircuits -- the basic components in the architecture of the brain. In 2005, he launched the Blue Brain Project: the first attempt to begin a systematic integration of all biological knowledge of the brain into unifying brain models for simulation on supercomputers. The strategies, technologies and methods developed in this pioneering work lie at the heart of the Human Brain Project.

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